On from Ondine

Welcome to Ondine, the place I landed in when I landed here going on 3 years now. Ondie, built in 1968, is more like a Russian prison than a student housing complex, with three deadly-slow elevators, washers and driers on every other floor, no 13th floor and no common room I wanted to be in. Ondine, on the edge of the university campus, a mere two blocks away from the campus police station and less than that from the fire station. Ondine, 1612 SW 6th, Avenue NW, Apt. 1511, Portland, OR 97201.

So how did I end up in student housing and in Ondine out of all the places? Well, it took a fair amount of research and striving to nail down a place to stay. See I arrive well into the end of the summer semester at Portland State and all the housing contracts had already been negotiated and sealed. I was left with my ingenious outreach and good luck – or tough luck, depending on how you see my experience at Ondine.

Ondine is not all that bad if you do not care whose mattress you are sleeping on, or who your neighbors and roommates are, if you are not bothered by the loud parties and the fire alarm pranks in the middle of a very very cold night. Ondine would not be that bad if you were anything other than a freshman… but if like me you were a “spoiled” Lebanese girl, used to her own (or least another family member’s) bed, room, bathroom, kitchen, closet, and everything else needed for a living, then you are in for major issues at Ondine…..

Not only did I have to share 20' by 11' with Megumi - my Japanese roommate- but I also had to share the bathroom and the kitchen with two other Asian girls (A1 and A2)- our suitemates. What did M+A1+A2=? a smelly, and I mean smelly arrangement. Let me tell you more….

A1 and A2 apparently had busy day lives – what they did with their lives, I have no idea. But what they chose to do with their evenings, I knew very well: cooking! And not just any kind of cooking – Asian cooking…. A1 and A2 always opted to make use of the kitchen in the late evening hours and utilize nothing less than authentic Asian ingredients accentuated with sesame cooking oil that stunk the already stale air for hours longer.

I kid you not. One frosty October night, A1 and A2 decided it was time for a meal at 11:00pm. They must have put the sesame oil on the electric stove, forgot they had done that, set off the fire alarm, nearly burned the unit down, and caused poor me to sleep with the windows wide open. The place smelled of burnt oil for days after that; my sheets smelled, my clothes smelled and even my books smelled. I was not happy. No sirry; I was not thrilled.

Let me give you another glance at what living in 1511 was like. Megumi was an exchange student. She was at Portland State for only one semester and I think that this thought conditioned her life choices. See Megumi probably thought that four months were not long enough for her to wash her sheets, and so she slept and re-slept on the same sheets from the day she moved in to the day she moved out. She must have also thought that showering and washing your hair once a week was sufficient to maintain personal hygiene and that is what she practiced.

Megumi also owned one plate, one set of chopsticks and one pan-cooks-all. All her ingredients were shipped to her from Japan – except for dairy products which she rarely used and vegetables which consisted mainly of cabbage and scallions.

Megumi would spend hours on her Japanese keyboarded laptop, do homework, go to class and sleep. She rarely spoke to me – actually I do not remember having any conversations with her except for when I asked her if she wanted to go in on getting a phone line for the room and then asking her to sign the release papers when I moved out of 1511. She would let the phone ring and not attempt to answer it.

Then, one day I left and she left and all that is left from that roommating period is a name. I did have her email address at one point, but I do not even remember what happened to it. I do not think I used it once, although I would have liked to. But it is too late for that now….

Megumi is gone, and so are A1 and A2. Portland State University is gone. Ondine is gone. Portland is gone. Oregon is gone. What is left are memories and stories; some amusing, some not so amusing. But all worth telling….